Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Staunton, May 24 – If Mongolia goes
ahead with plans to build three hydro-electric dams on the Selenga river which 80 provides percent of the water flowing into Lake
Baikal, that body of water is at risk of “an ecological catastrophe” that over
time could lead to its disappearance just as the Aral Sea in Central Asia
already has, according to Russian government experts.

Svetlana Subbotina and Angelina
Galanina write in today’s “Izvestiya” that this was the conclusion at a recent
closed-door session of experts at the Russian energy ministry and that there is
now a consensus that Mongolia’s plans would inflict “irreparable harm” on
Russia’s most famous lake (izvestia.ru/news/615071).

The language the experts used, the most
dramatic so far, have particular resonance now because of the drought in Russia
east of the Urals that has led to widespread and up to now uncontrolled fires
and of reports that Moscow is planning to sell or even give water to China that
have infuriated Russians in ways that recall Siberian river diversion ideas in
the 1980s.

The closed-door meeting focused on
coming up with ideas to do so, ranging from including Mongolia into the
electricity network of Russia’s border regions to building heat-powered
generating capacity within Mongolia itself, something that would have other
environmental consequences.

Helping to solve Mongolia’s energy
shortages in those ways, Oleg Lebedev, a Duma deputy and member of the
government’s ecology advisory council, says, would be “a less bloody means”
than allowing the dams to be constructed and Lake Baikal to die, again using
language not heard hitherto.

The “Izvestiya” article says that
the Russian energy ministry was unable to provide any reaction to this story
because its specialists on this issue are currently in Mongolia, an indication
of how serious this threat to Baikal is being taken and of how far the two
sides are from reaching any agreement.